You are on page 1of 51

(To appear in F. Jackson and M. Smith eds.

, Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of


Language)

http://www.dan.sperber.com/pragmatics.htm

PRAGMATICS

Dan Sperber & Deirdre Wilson

1. Introduction

Pragmatics is often described as the study of language use, and contrasted with the
study of language structure. In this broad sense, it covers a range of loosely related
research programmes from formal studies of deictic expressions to sociological
studies of ethnic verbal stereotypes. In a more focused sense (the one we will use
here), pragmatics contrasts with semantics, the study of linguistic meaning, and is the
study of how contextual factors interact with linguistic meaning in the interpretation
of utterances. Here we will briefly highlight a range of closely related, fairly central
pragmatic issues and approaches that have been of interest to linguists and
philosophers of language in the past thirty years or so. Pragmatics, as we will describe
it, is an empirical science, but one with philosophical origins and philosophical
import.

References to pragmatics are found in philosophy since the work of Charles


Morris (1938), who defined it as the study of the relations between signs and their
interpreters; however, it was the philosopher Paul Grice’s William James lectures at
Harvard in 1967 that led to the real development of the field. Grice introduced new
conceptual tools – in particular the notion of IMPLICATURE – in an attempt to reconcile
the concerns of the two then dominant approaches to the philosophy of language,
Ideal Language Philosophy and Ordinary Language Philosophy (on the philosophical
origins of pragmatics, see Recanati 1987, 1998, 2004a, b). Ideal language
philosophers in the tradition of Frege, Russell, Carnap and Tarski were studying
language as a formal system. Ordinary language philosophers in the tradition of the
later Wittgenstein, Austin and Strawson were studying actual linguistic usage,
highlighting in descriptive terms the complexity and subtlety of meanings and the
variety of forms of verbal communication. For ordinary language philosophers, there
was an unbridgeable gap between the semantics of formal and natural languages.
Grice showed that the gap could at least be reduced by sharply distinguishing
sentence meaning from speaker’s meaning, and explaining how relatively simple and
schematic linguistic meanings could be used in context to convey richer and fuzzier
speaker’s meanings, made up not only of WHAT WAS SAID, but also of what was
implicated. This became the foundation for most of modern pragmatics.

Grice (1967/89: 47) proposed a rather vague general principle (Modified


Occam's Razor) for deciding whether some aspect of interpretation is semantic or
pragmatic: Senses are not to be multiplied beyond necessity. However, judgements
about what is ‘necessary’ have too often been affected by disciplinary parochialism
and opportunistic considerations. When the work of Montague and Davidson
suggested that natural language semantics could be directly studied as a formal
system, Gricean pragmatics offered a rationale for dismissing a variety of hard-to-
handle intuitions as irrelevant to semantics. A good example of this is Nathan
Salmon’s claim that failure of substitutivity in belief contexts is only apparent, and
can be explained away in term of Gricean implicatures (Salmon 1986). However,
when formal semanticists feel they have the tools to handle some specific regularity in
interpretation, they tend to treat it as ipso facto semantic, and to see a pragmatic
account as inferior and unnecessary. Thus, the treatment of natural language
conditionals has proved a rich field for formal elaboration (e.g. Jackson 1991), while
the Gricean pragmatic approach to conditionals has been neglected. By the same
token, pragmatists tend to assume that whatever they feel capable of accounting for is
automatically pragmatic, on the ground that pragmatic explanations are more general,
albeit vaguer. A more principled and generally accepted division of labour between
semantics and pragmatics will involve more collaborative work. The recent
development of formal pragmatics (Stalnaker 1999; Kadmon 2001; Blutner & Zeevat
2003; Asher & Lascarides 2003) is to be welcomed in this context.
2. Three approaches to pragmatics

The approaches to pragmatics we will consider here all accept as foundational two
ideas defended by Grice (Grice 1989, chapters 1-7; 14; 18) (for representative
collections, see Davis 1991; Kasher 1998; Horn & Ward 2004). The first is that
sentence meaning is a vehicle for conveying a SPEAKER’S MEANING, and that a speaker’s
meaning is an overtly expressed intention which is fulfilled by being recognised.1[1]
In developing this idea, Grice opened the way for an inferential alternative to the
classical code model of communication. According to the classical view, utterances
are signals encoding the messages that speakers intend to convey, and comprehension
is achieved by decoding the signals to obtain the associated messages. On the
inferential view, utterances are not signals but pieces of evidence about the speaker's
meaning, and comprehension is achieved by inferring this meaning from evidence
provided not only by the utterance but also by the context. An utterance is, of course,
a linguistically coded piece of evidence, so that comprehension involves an element
of decoding. How far does linguistic decoding take the hearer towards an
interpretation of the speaker’s meaning? Implicitly for Grice and explicitly for John
Searle (1969: 43), the output of decoding is normally a sense that is close to being
fully propositional, so that only reference assignment is needed to determine what is
said, and the main role of inference in comprehension is to recover what is implicated.
Following Recanati (2004a), we will call this a LITERALIST approach to semantics.
However, a major development in pragmatics over the past thirty years (going much
further than Grice envisaged) has been to show that the explicit content of an
utterance, like the implicit content, is largely underdetermined by the linguistically
encoded meaning, and its recovery involves a substantial element of pragmatic
inference. Following Recanati (2004a), we will call this a CONTEXTUALIST approach.
The second foundational idea defended by Grice is that, in inferring the
speaker’s meaning, the hearer is guided by the expectation that utterances should meet

1[1] In Grice’s original formulation, “‘[Speaker] meant something by x’ is (roughly)


equivalent to ‘[Speaker] intended the utterance of x to produce some effect in an
audience by means of the recognition of this intention’” (Grice 1957/89: 220). For
discussion and reformulation, see Strawson (1964); Searle (1969, 1983); Schiffer
(1972); Recanati (1986, 1987); Grice (1982); Sperber & Wilson (1986/95); Bach
(1987); Neale (1992).
some specific standards. The standards Grice proposed were based on the assumption
that conversation is a rational, cooperative activity. In formulating their utterances,
speakers are expected to follow a Cooperative Principle, backed by maxims of
Quantity (informativeness), Quality (truthfulness), Relation (relevance) and Manner
(clarity) which are such that “in paradigmatic cases, their observance promotes and
their violation dispromotes conversational rationality” (Grice 1989: 370):

Cooperative Principle (Grice 1967/1989: 26-27)

Make your contribution such as is required, at the stage at which it occurs, by the
accepted purpose or direction of the talk exchange in which you are engaged.

Quantity maxims

1. Make your contribution as informative as is required (for the current purposes of


the exchange).

2. Do not make your contribution more informative than is required.

Quality maxims

Supermaxim: Try to make your contribution one that is true.

1. Do not say what you believe to be false.

2. Do not say that for which you lack adequate evidence.

Maxim of Relation

Be relevant.

Manner maxims

Supermaxim: Be perspicuous

1. Avoid obscurity of expression.


2. Avoid ambiguity.

3. Be brief (avoid unnecessary prolixity)2[2]

4. Be orderly.

When an utterance has several linguistically possible interpretations, the best


hypothesis for the hearer to choose is the one that best satisfies the Cooperative
Principle and maxims. Sometimes, in order to explain why a maxim has been
(genuinely or apparently) violated, the hearer has to assume that the speaker believes,
and was trying to communicate, more than was explicitly said. Such implicitly
communicated propositions, or implicatures, are widely seen (along with
presuppositions and illocutionary force) as the main subject matter of pragmatics.3[3]

Most current pragmatic theories share Grice’s view that inferential


comprehension is governed by expectations about the behaviour of speakers, but
differ as to what these expectations are. Neo-Griceans such as Atlas (2005), Gazdar
(1979), Horn (1984, 1989, 1992, 2000, 2004, 2005) and Levinson (1983, 1987, 2000)
stay relatively close to Grice’s maxims. For instance, Levinson (2000) proposes the
following principles, based on Grice’s Quantity and Manner maxims (and given here
in abridged form):

Q-Principle (Levinson 2000: 76)

Do not provide a statement that is informationally weaker than your knowledge of the
world allows.

I-Principle (Levinson 2000: 114)

2[2] The wording of this maxim (and perhaps of the supermaxim of Manner) is a nice
illustration of Grice’s playfulness.

3[3] In this chapter, we will focus on the recovery of explicit truth-conditional content
and implicatures; for brief comments on the treatment of presupposition and
illocutionary force, see section 6 and footnote 15.
Produce the minimal linguistic information sufficient to achieve your
communicational ends.

M-Principle (Levinson 2000: 136)

Indicate an abnormal, nonstereotypical situation by using marked expressions that


contrast with those you would use to describe the corresponding normal, stereotypical
situations.

Each principle has a corollary for the audience (e.g. ‘Take it that the speaker made the
strongest statement consistent with what he knows’) which provides a heuristic for
hearers to use in identifying the speaker’s meaning.

For many philosophers and linguists, an attraction of the neo-Gricean programme


is its attempt to combine an inferential account of communication with a view of
language strongly influenced by formal semantics and generative grammar. The aim
is to solve specifically linguistic problems by modelling pragmatics as closely as
possible on formal semantics, assigning interpretations to sentence-context pairs
without worrying too much about the psychological mechanisms involved. The
following comment from Gazdar (1979: 49) gives a flavour of this approach:

The tactic adopted here is to examine some of the data that would, or should, be
covered by Grice’s quantity maxim and then propose a relatively simple formal
solution to the problem of describing the behaviour of that data. This solution may be
seen as a special case of Grice’s quantity maxim, or as an alternative to it, or as
merely a conventional rule for assigning one class of conversational meanings to one
class of utterances.

Accordingly, neo-Griceans have tended to focus on GENERALISED conversational


implicatures, which are “normally (in the absence of special circumstances)” carried
by use of a certain form of words (Grice 1967/89: 37), and are therefore codifiable to
some degree. For example, the utterance in (1a) would normally convey a generalised
implicature of the form in (1b):4[4]

1a. Some of my friends are philosophers.

1b. Not all of my friends are philosophers.

Levinson (2000) treats generalised implicatures as assigned by default to all


utterances of this type, and contextually cancelled only in special circumstances.
PARTICULARISED implicatures, by contrast, depend on “special features of the context”
(Grice 1967/1989: 37), and cannot be assigned by default. For example, the speaker of
(2a) would not normally implicate (2b), but this implicature might be conveyed if (2a)
were uttered (in England) in response to the question “Are the pubs open?”:

2a. It’s midnight.

2b. The pubs are closed.

Neo-Griceans, and formal pragmatists in general, have little to say about


particularised implicatures.5[5] The result is a significant narrowing in the domain of
pragmatic research, which has yielded valuable descriptions of data from this domain,
but is driven largely by methodological considerations.

4[4] On generalised implicatures and the neo-Gricean approach, see Horn (1984,
1992, 2004, 2005); Levinson (1983, 1987, 2000); Hirschberg (1991); Carston (1995,
1998); Green (1995); Matsumoto (1995); Sperber & Wilson (1995).

5[5] Grice himself does not seem to have seen the distinction between generalised and
particularised implicatures as theoretically significant. For discussion, see Carston
(1995, 1998, 2002); Sperber & Wilson (1995); for experimental evidence on default
inference, see Noveck (2001); Chierchia et al. (2001); Bezuidenhout & Morris (2004);
Papafragou & Musolino (2003); Breheny, Katsos & Williams (2004.); Sperber &
Noveck (2004).
Relevance theory (Sperber & Wilson 1986/95; Carston 2002; Wilson & Sperber
2002, 2004), while still based on Grice’s two foundational ideas, departs from his
framework in two important respects. First, while Grice was mainly concerned with
the role of pragmatic inference in implicit communication, relevance theorists have
consistently argued that the explicit side of communication is just as inferential and
worthy of pragmatic attention as the implicit side (Wilson & Sperber 1981). This has
implications not only for the nature of explicit communication but also for semantics.
As noted above, Grice and others (e.g. Searle and Lewis) who have contributed to the
development of an inferential approach to communication have tended to minimise
the gap between sentence meaning and speaker's meaning. They treat sentences as
encoding something as close as possible to full propositions, and explicit
communication as governed by a maxim or convention of truthfulness, so that the
inference from sentence meaning to speaker’s meaning is simply a matter of assigning
referents to referring expressions, and perhaps of deriving implicatures. Relevance
theorists have argued that relevance-oriented inferential processes are efficient
enough to allow for a much greater slack between sentence meaning and speaker's
meaning, with sentence meaning typically being quite fragmentary and incomplete,
and speaker’s explicit meaning going well beyond the minimal proposition arrived at
by disambiguation and reference assignment.

Relevance theory also departs substantially from Grice’s account of the


expectations that guide the comprehension process. For Griceans and neo-Griceans,
these expectations derive from principles and maxims: that is, rules of behaviour that
speakers are expected to obey but may, on occasion, violate (e.g. because of a clash of
maxims, or in order to indicate an implicature, as in Grice’s account of tropes). For
relevance theorists, the very act of communicating raises precise and predictable
expectations of relevance, which are enough on their own to guide the hearer towards
the speaker’s meaning. Speakers may fail to be relevant, but they can not, if they are
genuinely communicating (as opposed, say, to rehearsing a speech), produce
utterances that do not convey a presumption of their own relevance.

Relevance theory starts from a detailed account of relevance and its role in
cognition. RELEVANCE is defined as a property of inputs to cognitive processes
(whether external stimuli, which can be perceived and attended to, or internal
representations, which can be stored, recalled, or used as premises in inference). An
input is relevant to an individual when it connects with available contextual
assumptions to yield POSITIVE COGNITIVE EFFECTS: for example, true contextual
implications, or warranted strengthenings or revisions of existing assumptions.
Everything else being equal, the greater the positive cognitive effects achieved, and
the smaller the mental effort required (to represent the input, access a context and
derive these cognitive effects), the greater the relevance of the input to the individual
at that time.

Relevance theory is based on two general claims about the role of relevance in
cognition and communication:

Cognitive Principle of Relevance:

Human cognition tends to be geared to the maximisation of relevance.

Communicative Principle of Relevance:

Every act of overt communication conveys a presumption of its own optimal


relevance.

As noted above, these principles are descriptive rather than normative. The first, or
Cognitive, Principle of Relevance yields a variety of predictions about human
cognitive processes. It predicts that our perceptual mechanisms tend spontaneously to
pick out potentially relevant stimuli, our retrieval mechanisms tend spontaneously to
activate potentially relevant assumptions, and our inferential mechanisms tend
spontaneously to process them in the most productive way. This principle has
essential implications for human communication. In order to communicate, the
communicator needs her audience’s attention. If attention tends automatically to go to
what is most relevant at the time, then the success of communication depends on the
audience taking the utterance to be relevant enough to be worthy of attention.
Wanting her communication to succeed, the communicator, by the very act of
communicating, indicates that she wants the audience to see her utterance as relevant,
and this is what the Communicative Principle of Relevance states.

According to relevance theory, the PRESUMPTION OF OPTIMAL RELEVANCE conveyed by


every utterance is precise enough to ground a specific comprehension heuristic that
hearers may use in interpreting the speaker’s meaning:

Presumption of optimal relevance

(a) The utterance is relevant enough to be worth processing.

(b) It is the most relevant one compatible with the communicator’s abilities and
preferences.

Relevance-guided comprehension heuristic

(a) Follow a path of least effort in constructing an interpretation of the utterance (and
in particular in resolving ambiguities and referential indeterminacies, in going
beyond linguistic meaning, in supplying contextual assumptions, computing
implicatures, etc.).

(b) Stop when your expectations of relevance are satisfied.

A hearer using the relevance-theoretic comprehension heuristic during online


comprehension should proceed in the following way. The aim is to find an
interpretation of the speaker’s meaning that satisfies the presumption of optimal
relevance. To achieve this aim, the hearer must enrich the decoded sentence meaning
at the explicit level, and complement it at the implicit level by supplying contextual
assumptions which will combine with it to yield enough conclusions (or other
cognitive effects) to make the utterance relevant in the expected way. What route
should he follow in disambiguating, assigning reference, constructing a context,
deriving conclusions, etc.? According to the relevance-theoretic comprehension
heuristic, he should follow a path of least effort, and stop at the first overall
interpretation that satisfies his expectations of relevance. This is the key to relevance-
theoretic pragmatics.

The Gricean, neo-Gricean and relevance-theoretic approaches are not the only
theoretical approaches to pragmatics (even in the restricted sense of ‘pragmatics’ we
are using here). Important contributors to pragmatic theorising with original points of
view include Anscombre & Ducrot (1983); Asher & Lascarides (1995, 1998, 2003);
Bach (1987, 1994, 1999, 2001, 2004); Bach & Harnish (1979); Blutner & Zeevat
(2003); Clark (1977, 1993, 1996); Dascal (1981); Ducrot (1984); Fauconnier (1975,
1985, 1997); Harnish (1976, 1994); Hobbs (1979, 1985, 2004); Hobbs et al. (1993);
Kasher (1976, 1982, 1984, 1998); Katz (1977); Lewis (1979, 1983); Neale (1990,
1992, 2004, forthcoming); Recanati (1987, 1995, 2002, 2004a); Searle (1969, 1975,
1979); Stalnaker (1974, 1999); Sweetser (1990); Travis (1975. 2001); van der Auwera
(1981, 1985, 1997); van Rooy (1999); Vanderveken (1990-91). However, the
approaches outlined above are arguably the dominant ones.

In the rest of this chapter, we will briefly consider four main issues of current
interest to linguists and philosophers of language: literalism versus contextualism in
semantics (section 3), the nature of explicit truth-conditional content and the
borderline between explicit and implicit communication (section 4), lexical
pragmatics and the analysis of metaphor, approximation and narrowing (section 5),
and the communication of illocutionary force and other non-truth-conditional aspects
of meaning (section 6). We will end with some comments on the prospects for future
collaboration between philosophy and pragmatics.

3. Literalism and contextualism in semantics

Grice’s distinction between saying and implicating is a natural starting point for
examining the semantics-pragmatics distinction.6[6] One of Grice’s aims was to show
that his notion of speaker’s meaning could be used to ground traditional semantic

6[6] On the saying-implicating distinction, see Carston (2002: chapter 2.2); Wilson &
Sperber (2002: section 7); Recanati (2004a: chapter 1). For representative collections
on the semantics-pragmatics distinction, see Turner (1999); Szabo (2005).
notions such as sentence meaning and word meaning (Grice 1967/89: chapter 6). In
his framework, a speaker’s meaning is made up of what is said and (optionally) what
is implicated, and Grice sees sentence meaning as contributing to both. What a
speaker says is determined by truth-conditional aspects of linguistic meaning, plus
disambiguation, plus reference assignment. Thus, identifying what the speaker of (3)
has said would involve decoding the truth-conditional meaning of the sentence
uttered, disambiguating the ambiguous word ‘pupil’ and assigning reference to the
indexicals ‘I’ and ‘now’:

3. I have two pupils now.

The resulting proposition is sometimes called the LITERAL MEANING of the utterance, or
the PROPOSITION EXPRESSED. Grice saw the truth-value of a declarative utterance like (3)
as depending on whether this proposition is true or false. By contrast, the meanings of
non-truth-conditional expressions such as ‘but’, ‘moreover’ or ‘so’ are seen as
contributing to what is CONVENTIONALLY IMPLICATED rather than what is said; in Grice’s
terms, conventional implicatures involve the performance of “higher-order” speech
acts such as contrasting, adding and explaining, which are parasitic on the “central,
basic” speech act of saying (Grice 1989: 359-368).7[7] For Grice, the semantics-
pragmatics distinction therefore cross-cuts the saying-implicating distinction, with
semantics contributing both to what is said and to what is implicated.

However, although he allows for semantic contributions to implicit content, and


although his Quantity maxims (‘Do not say what you believe to be false’, ‘Have
adequate evidence for what you say’) are presented as applying at the level of what is
said, Grice seems not to have noticed, or at least not to have pursued the idea, that
pragmatic inference might contribute to explicit content apart (perhaps) from helping
with disambiguation or reference assignment. It therefore seemed quite feasible to
many (apparently including Grice himself) to combine a literalist approach to

7[7] Karttunen & Peters (1979) extend Grice’s notion to other non-truth-conditional
items such as ‘even’. Blakemore (1987, 2002) and Bach (1999) criticise the notion of
conventional implicature and offer alternative accounts; on non-truth-conditional
meaning, see section 6.
semantics with a Gricean approach to pragmatics.8[8] The result was a division of
labour in which pragmatists concentrated on implicatures, semanticists concentrated
on literal meaning, and neither paid sufficient attention to potential pragmatic
contributions to the proposition expressed.

As noted above, literalist approaches to semantics treat sentences as encoding


something close to full propositions. Extreme forms of literalism, found in early
versions of formal semantics, were adopted by neo-Griceans such as Gazdar (1979),
whose slogan Pragmatics = meaning minus truth conditions was very influential. On
an extreme literalist approach, the sense and reference of (3) are seen as determined
by purely linguistic rules or conventions, whose output would generally coincide with
the intended sense and reference, but might override them in the case of a clash. More
moderate literalists see the output of semantics as a logical form with variables for
indexicals and other referential expressions, needing only reference assignment to
yield a fully propositional form.

On a contextualist approach to semantics, by contrast, sentence meaning is seen


as typically quite fragmentary and incomplete, and as falling far short of determining
a complete proposition even after disambiguation and reference assignment have
taken place. A considerable body of work in semantics and pragmatics over the last
thirty years suggests strongly that the gap between sentence meaning and proposition
expressed is considerably wider than Grice thought, and is unlikely to be bridged
simply by assigning values to referential expressions. Thus, consider (4a-b):

4a. The sea is too cold.

4b. That book is difficult.

Even after disambiguation and reference assignment, sentences (4a) and (4b) are
semantically incomplete: in order to derive a complete, truth-evaluable proposition,

8[8] Hedges are necessary because Grice does occasionally suggest that what is said
may go beyond the literal meaning. See his comments on “dictiveness without
formality” in Grice (1989: 361).
the hearer of (4a) must decide what the speaker is claiming the sea is too cold for, and
the hearer of (4b) must decide whether the speaker is describing the book as difficult
to read, understand, write, review, sell, find, etc., and by comparison to what. It is
quite implausible that these aspects of truth-conditional content are determined by
purely linguistic rules or conventions, and fairly implausible that they are determined
merely by assigning values to linguistically-specified variables. Given an inferential
system rich enough to disambiguate, assign reference and compute implicatures, it is
more natural (and parsimonious) to treat the output of semantics as a highly schematic
logical form, which is fleshed out into fully propositional form by pragmatic
inferences that go well beyond what is envisaged on a literalist approach. The result is
a division of labour in which semanticists deal with decoded meaning, pragmatists
deal with inferred meaning, and pragmatic inference makes a substantial contribution
to truth-conditional content.

In fact, the contribution of pragmatic inference to the truth-conditional content


of utterances goes much further than examples (3)-(4) would suggest. Consider (5a-c):

5a. I’ll bring a bottle to the party.

5b. I’m going to sneeze.

5c. If you leave your window open and a burglar gets in, you have no right to
compensation.

Whereas in (4a-b) inferential enrichment is needed to complete a fragmentary


sentence meaning into a fully propositional form, in (5a-c), inferential enrichment of a
fully propositional form is needed to yield a truth-conditional content that satisfies
pragmatic expectations (e.g. the Presumption of Optimal Relevance from section 2).
Thus, the speaker of (5a) would normally be understood as asserting not merely that
she will bring some bottle or other, but that she will bring a full bottle of alcohol; the
speaker of (5b) would normally be understood as asserting not merely that she is
going to sneeze at some time in the future, but that she is going to sneeze very soon;
and the speaker of (5c) would normally be understood as asserting that if a burglar
gets in through the window as a result of its being left open by the hearer, the hearer
has no right to compensation for any consequent loss. Enrichments of this type are
surely driven by pragmatic rather than semantic considerations. They argue for a
contextualist approach to semantics, combined with an inferential pragmatics which
makes a substantial contribution to the proposition expressed.

From a radical literalist perspective, on which the semantics-pragmatics


borderline should coincide with the borderline between saying and implicating,
examples such as (4)-(5) show unexpected “intrusions” of pragmatic inference into
the domain of semantics. As Levinson (2000: 195) puts it, “there is no consistent way
of cutting up the semiotic pie such that ‘what is said’ excludes ‘what is implicated’”.
Literalists see this as a problem. Levinson’s solution is to abandon Grice’s view that
saying and implicating are mutually exclusive. From a contextualist perspective, on
which the semantics-pragmatics distinction coincides with the borderline between
decoding and inference, examples such as (4)-(5) come as no surprise. An obvious
way of handling these cases is to analyse the assignment of truth conditions to
utterances in two phases. In one phase of analysis, natural-language sentences would
be seen as decoded into schematic logical forms, which are inferentially elaborated
into fully propositional forms by pragmatic processes geared to the identification of
speakers’ meanings.9[9] These propositional forms would be the primary bearers of
truth conditions, and might themselves provide input, in a second phase of analysis, to
a semantics of conceptual representations (what Fodor calls “real semantics”) which
maps them onto the states of affairs they represent. On this approach, there is no
pragmatic “intrusion” into a homogeneous truth-conditional semantics. Rather, there
are two distinct types of semantics – linguistic semantics and the semantics of
conceptual representations – of which the first, at least, is contextualist rather than
literalist.10[10]
9[9] Decoding and inferential elaboration actually overlap in time as online
comprehension proceeds, with components of the sentence providing input to
elaboration as soon as they are decoded. Moreover, disambiguation, i.e. the selection
of one of several decoding hypotheses, is typically affected by pragmatic elaboration.

10[10] For accounts along these lines, see Sperber & Wilson (1986/95, 1998a);
Carston (1988, 2002); Recanati (1989, 2004a); Wilson & Sperber (2002); Neale
(2004, forthcoming). Alternative, more literalist accounts, have been defended in
Stanley (2000, 2002); Stanley & Szabó (2000).
4. Explicit and implicit communication

In much of contemporary philosophy of language and linguistics, the notions of


saying and literal meaning are seen as doing double duty, characterising, on the one
hand, the (minimally enriched) output of semantics, and, on the other, what is
explicitly communicated by an utterance. We have already argued that the traditional
notions of saying and literal meaning are inadequate for semantic purposes: sentence
meaning is much more schematic than literalist approaches to semantics suggest. We
now want to argue that they are also inadequate for pragmatic purposes: what is
explicitly communicated by an utterance typically goes well beyond what is said or
literally meant, and may be vaguer and less determinate than is generally assumed.

In analysing the notion of speaker’s meaning, Grice introduced the terms


‘implicate’ and ‘implicature’ to refer to what is implicitly communicated, but rather
than use the symmetrical ‘explicate’ and ‘explicature’, or just talk of what is explicitly
communicated, he chose to contrast what is implicated with the ordinary-language
notion ‘what is said’. This terminological choice reflected both a presupposition and a
goal. The presupposition was that ‘what is said’ is an intuitively clear, common-sense
notion. The goal was to argue against a view of meaning that ordinary-language
philosophers were defending at the time. As noted in section 1, to achieve this goal,
Grice wanted to show that what is said is best described by a relatively parsimonious
semantics, while much of the complexity and subtlety of utterance interpretation
should be seen as falling on the implicit side. We share Grice's desire to relieve the
semantics of natural language of whatever can be best explained at the pragmatic
level, but we take a rather different view of how this pragmatic explanation should go.

We suggested in section 3 that the intuitive truth-conditional content of an


utterance – what the speaker would normally be taken to assert – may go well beyond
the minimal proposition obtained by decoding, disambiguation and reference
assignment. We will develop this claim in more detail by considering an example in
which Lisa drops by her neighbours, the Joneses, one evening as they are sitting down
to supper, and the following exchange takes place:
6a. Alan Jones: Do you want to join us for supper?

6b. Lisa: No thanks. I’ve eaten.

On a standard Gricean account, what Lisa has said in uttering (6b) is that she has
eaten something or other at some time or other. However, what she would normally
be understood as asserting is something stronger: namely, that she has eaten supper on
the evening of utterance. Inferential elaborations of this type, which seem to be
performed automatically and unconsciously during comprehension, are ruled out by
Grice’s account of what is said.

The term ‘explicature’ was introduced into relevance theory, on the model of
Grice's ‘implicature’, to characterise the speaker’s explicit meaning in a way that
allows for richer elaboration than Grice’s notion of ‘what is said’:

Explicature (Sperber & Wilson 1986/95: 182)

A proposition communicated by an utterance is an EXPLICATURE if and only if it is a


development of a logical form encoded by the utterance.

The process of DEVELOPING a logical form may involve not only reference assignment
but other types of pragmatic enrichment illustrated in (4)-(6). The implicatures of an
utterance are all the other propositions that make up the speaker’s meaning:

Implicature (Sperber & Wilson 1986/95: 182)

A proposition communicated by an utterance, but not explicitly, is an IMPLICATURE.


Thus, Lisa’s meaning in (6b) might include the explicature that she has eaten supper
on the evening of utterance11[11] and the implicature that she doesn’t want to eat with
the Joneses because she’s already had supper that evening.

Explicatures are recovered by a combination of decoding and inference. Different


utterances may convey the same explicature in different ways, with different
proportions of decoding and inference involved. Compare Lisa’s answer in (6b)
(repeated below) with the three alternative versions in (6c-6e):

6a. Alan: Do you want to join us for supper?

6b. Lisa: No thanks. I’ve eaten.

6c. Lisa: No, thanks. I've already eaten supper.

6d. Lisa: No, thanks. I've already eaten tonight.

6e. Lisa: No, thanks. I've already eaten supper tonight.

All four answers communicate not only the same overall meaning but also the same
explicature and implicatures. If this is not immediately obvious, there is a standard
test for deciding whether some part of the speaker’s meaning is part of the explicit
truth-conditional content of the utterance or merely an implicature. The test involves
checking whether the item falls within the scope of logical operators when embedded
into a negative or conditional sentence: explicit truth-conditional content falls within
the scope of negation and other logical operators, while implicatures do not (Carston
2002: chapter 2.6.3). Thus, consider the hypothesis that the explicature of (6b) is
simply the trivial truth that Lisa has eaten something at some point before the time of
utterance, and that she is merely implicating that she has eaten that evening. The
standard embedding test suggests that this hypothesis is false. If Lisa had replied ‘I
haven't eaten’, she would clearly not have been asserting that she has never eaten in

11[11] We are considering here only what we call basic or first-level explicatures. We
also claim that there are higher-level explicatures incorporating speech-act or
propositional-attitude information; for comments, see section 6.
her life, but merely denying that she has eaten supper that very evening. So in
replying ‘I've eaten,’ Lisa is explicitly communicating that she has eaten supper that
very evening.

Although all four answers in (6b-e) convey the same explicature, there is a clear
sense in which Lisa’s meaning is least explicit in (6b) and most explicit in (6e), with
(6c) and (6d) falling in between. These differences in DEGREE OF EXPLICITNESS are
analysable in terms of the relative proportions of decoding and inference involved:

Degrees of explicitness (Sperber & Wilson 1986/95: 182)

The greater the relative contribution of decoding, and the smaller the relative
contribution of pragmatic inference, the more explicit an explicature will be (and
inversely).

When the speaker’s meaning is quite explicit, as in (6e), and in particular when each
word in an utterance is used to convey one of its encoded meanings, what we are
calling the explicature is close to what might be commonsensically described as the
explicit content, or what is said, or the literal meaning of the utterance. The less
explicit the meaning, the more responsibility the hearer must take for the
interpretation he constructs: in relevance-theoretic terms, explicatures may be
STRONGER or WEAKER, depending on the degree of indeterminacy introduced by the
inferential aspect of comprehension. Whether the explicature is strong or weak, the
notion of explicature applies straightforwardly. However, the same is not true of the
notions of literal meaning and what is said. When asked what Lisa has said by
uttering (6b) (‘I’ve eaten’) with a relatively weak explicature, people’s intuitions
typically waver. The weaker the explicature, the harder it is to paraphrase what the
speaker was saying except by transposing it into an indirect quotation (‘She said she
had eaten’), which is always possible but does not really help to specify the content of
what was communicated. In such cases, the notions of explicature and degrees of
explicitness have clear advantages over the traditional notions of literal meaning and
what is said.12[12]

According to our account, the recovery of both explicit and implicit content may
involve a substantial element of pragmatic inference. This raises questions about how
explicatures and implicatures are identified, and where the borderline between them is
drawn. We have argued that the linguistically-encoded meaning of an utterance gives
no more than a schematic indication of the speaker’s meaning. The hearer’s task is to
use this indication, together with background knowledge, to construct an
interpretation of the speaker’s meaning, guided by expectations of relevance raised by
the utterance itself. This overall task can be broken down into a number of sub-tasks:

Sub-tasks in the overall comprehension process

(a) Constructing an appropriate hypothesis about explicatures by developing the


linguistically-encoded logical form.

(b) Constructing an appropriate hypothesis about the intended contextual


assumptions (IMPLICATED PREMISES).

(c) Constructing an appropriate hypothesis about intended contextual implications


(IMPLICATED CONCLUSIONS).

These sub-tasks should not be thought of as sequentially ordered. The hearer does not
first decode the sentence meaning, then construct an explicature and identify an

12[12] For discussion of the relevance-theoretic account of explicatures and


alternative views on the explicit-implicit distinction, see Bach (1994, 2004); Levinson
(2000: 186-98); Horn (2004, 2005); Stanley (2000, 2002); see also Carston (2002:
chapter 2.5); Recanati (2004a). Bach introduces a notion of ‘impliciture’, distinct
from implicature, to cover those aspects of what is said that are not linguistically
encoded. He rejects the notion of explicature on the ground that pragmatic inferences
are cancellable and nothing cancellable can be explicit. By this criterion (on which the
explicit-implicit distinction essentially reduces to the coding-inference or semantics-
pragmatics distinction), not even disambiguation and reference assignment can
contribute to explicit content, and the resulting notion falls well short of Grice’s
notion of what is said.
appropriate context, and then derive a range of implicated conclusions.
Comprehension is an on-line process, and hypotheses about explicatures, implicated
premises and implicated conclusions are developed in parallel, against a background
of expectations which may be revised or elaborated as the utterance unfolds. In
particular, the hearer may bring to the comprehension process not only a general
presumption of relevance, but more specific expectations about how the utterance will
be relevant to him (what implicated conclusions he is intended to derive), and these
may contribute, via backwards inference, to the identification of explicatures and
implicated premises. The overall process is guided by the relevance-theoretic
comprehension heuristic presented in section 2 (‘Follow a path of least effort in
constructing an interpretation that satisfies your expectations of relevance’).

A crucial point about the relation between explicatures and implicatures is that
implicated conclusions must be deducible from explicatures together with an
appropriate set of contextual assumptions. A hearer using the relevance-theoretic
comprehension heuristic is therefore entitled to follow a path of least effort in
developing the encoded schematic sentence meaning to a point where it combines
with available contextual assumptions to warrant the derivation of enough conclusions
to make the utterance relevant in the expected way. This is what happens in Lisa’s
utterance (6b) (repeated below):

6a. Alan Jones: Do you want to join us for supper?

6b. Lisa: No thanks. I’ve eaten.

Lisa’s utterance ‘No thanks’ should raise a doubt in Alan’s mind about why she is
refusing his invitation, and he can reasonably expect the next part of her utterance to
settle this doubt by offering an explanation of her refusal. From encyclopaedic
information associated with the concept EATING, he should find it relatively easy to
supply the contextual assumptions in (7):
7a. People don’t normally want to eat supper twice in one evening.

7b. The fact that one has already eaten supper on a given evening is a good reason for
refusing an invitation to supper that evening.

These would suggest an explanation of Lisa’s refusal, provided that the encoded
meaning of her utterance is enriched to yield an explicature along the lines in (8):

8. Lisa has already eaten supper on the evening of utterance.

By combining (7) and (8), Alan can derive the implicated conclusion that Lisa is
refusing his invitation because she has already had supper that evening (which may in
turn lead on to further implications), thus satisfying his expectations of relevance. On
this approach, explicatures and implicatures are constructed by mutually adjusting
tentative hypotheses about explicatures, implicated premises and implicated
conclusions in order to satisfy the expectations of relevance raised by the utterance
itself.13[13]

The mutual adjustment process suggests an account of how implicated premises


may be “accommodated” in the course of comprehension (Lewis 1979). Consider the
exchange in (9):

9a. Bill: I hear you’ve moved from Manhattan to Brooklyn.

9b. Sue: The rent is lower.

13[13] On the explicit-implicit distinction in relevance theory, see Sperber & Wilson
(1986/95: chapter 4.2, 4.4); Carston (2002: chapter 2.3); Wilson & Sperber (2004).
For a more detailed analysis of the mutual adjustment process for (6b), see Wilson &
Sperber (2002, Table 1).
In interpreting Sue’s utterance in (9b), Bill will expect it to be relevant to his
preceding remark, for instance by disputing it, elaborating on it, or answering a
question it raises (e.g. ‘Why did you move?’). In ordinary circumstances, the easiest
way to arrive at a sufficiently relevant interpretation (and hence at the interpretation
favoured by the relevance-theoretic comprehension heuristic) would involve
interpreting ‘the rent’ to mean the rent in Brooklyn, and ‘cheaper’ to mean cheaper
than in Manhattan.14[14] (9b), so understood and combined with an assumption such
as (10), provides the answer to an implicit question raised by Bill:

10. A lower rent is a reason to move.

Of course, not everyone would be prepared to move in order to get a lower rent, and
Bill may not have known in advance whether Sue would or not; in Lewis’s terms, in
interpreting her utterance he may have to ACCOMMODATE an assumption such as (10). In
the relevance-theoretic framework, what Lewis calls accommodation involves adding
a new (i.e. previously unevidenced or under-evidenced) premise to the context in the
course of the mutual adjustment process geared to satisfying the hearer’s expectations
of relevance. Which premises are added will depend on the order in which they can be
constructed, via a combination of backwards inference from expected conclusions and
forward inference from information available in memory. By encouraging the hearer
to supply some such premises in the search for relevance, the speaker takes some
responsibility for their truth.15[15]

Implicatures, like explicatures, may be stronger or weaker, depending on the


degree of indeterminacy introduced by the inferential element of comprehension.
When the hearer’s expectations of relevance can be satisfied by deriving any one of a
14[14] Definite descriptions such as ‘the rent’ in (9b) have been treated in the
pragmatic literature as cases of ‘bridging implicature’ (Clark 1977) and analysed
using relevance theory by Matsui (2000), Wilson & Matsui (2000); Sperber &
Noveck (2004).

15[15] To the extent that pragmatic ‘presuppositions’ can be analysed as implicated


(or accommodated) premises (cf. Grice 1981; Atlas 2004), the mutual adjustment
process also sheds light on their derivation. On other types of ‘presuppositional’
effect, see Sperber & Wilson (1986/95: chapter 4, section 5) and section 6 below.
range of roughly similar conclusions, at roughly comparable cost, from a range of
roughly similar premises, the hearer also has to take some responsibility for the
particular premises he supplies and the conclusions he derives from them. In
interpreting Sue’s utterance in (9b), for example, Bill might have supplied any of the
premises in (11) or many others of a similar tenor:

11a. A substantially lower rent for an otherwise comparable residence is a good


reason to move.

11b. Sue could not afford her Manhattan rent.

11c. Sue would rather spend as little as possible on rent.

11d. The relative benefit of living in Manhattan rather than Brooklyn was not worth
the high rent Sue was paying.

The implicated conclusion that Bill will derive from Sue’s utterance depends on the
particular implicated premise he supplies. Still, it is clearly part of Sue’s intention that
Bill should provide some such premise and derive some such conclusion. In other
words, Sue’s overall meaning has a clear gist, but not an exact paraphrase. The greater
the range of alternatives, the WEAKER the implicatures, and the more responsibility the
hearer has to take for the particular choices he makes. Much of human communication
is weak in this sense, a fact that a pragmatic theory should explain rather than idealise
away.

Grice (1967/1989: 39-40) comments in passing on the indeterminacy of


implicatures:

Since to calculate a conversational implicature is to calculate what has to be supposed


in order to preserve the supposition that the Cooperative Principle is being observed,
and since there may be various possible specific explanations, a list of which may be
open, the conversational implicatum [implicature] in such cases will be a disjunction
of such specific explanations; and if the list of these is open, the implicatum will have
just the kind of indeterminacy that many actual implicata [implicatures] do in fact
seem to possess.

However, he did not pursue the idea, or suggest how the indeterminacy of
implicatures might be compatible with their calculability, which he also regarded as
an essential feature. In the Gricean and neo-Gricean literature, this problem is
generally idealised away:

Because indeterminacy is hard to handle formally, I shall mostly ignore it in the


discussion that follows. A fuller treatment of implicatures would not be guilty of this
omission, which is really only defensible on formal grounds. (Gazdar 1979: 40)

Relevance theory argues that indeterminacy is quite pervasive at both explicit and
implicit levels, and provides an analysis that fits well with Grice’s intuitive
description.

5. Lexical pragmatics: metaphor, approximation and narrowing

The claim that an utterance does not encode the speaker’s meaning but is merely a
piece of evidence for it has implications at the lexical level. Metaphors and other
tropes are the most obvious cases where the meaning conveyed by use of a word goes
beyond the linguistically encoded sense. Relevance theory gives a quite different
account of these lexical pragmatic phenomena from the standard Gricean one. Gricean
pragmatics is often seen as having shed new light on the distinction between literal
and figurative meaning. The distinction goes back to classical rhetoric, where it was
assumed that (in modern terms):

(a) Linguistic expressions have a literal meaning.

(b) They are normally used to convey this literal meaning.

(c) Literal meanings are primary; figurative meanings are produced by systematic
departures from literal meaning along dimensions such as similarity (in the case of
metaphor), part-whole relationships (in the case of synecdoche), contradiction (in
the case of irony) and so on.

(d) Figurative meanings are paraphrasable in literal terms, and can therefore be
literally conveyed.

(e) When a meaning is conveyed figuratively rather than literally, it is in order to


please or impress the audience.

Much of contemporary philosophy of language shares these assumptions, from which


it follows that only literal meaning matters to the study of meaning. Metaphor, irony,
and other tropes are seen as more relevant to aesthetics and the study of literature than
to philosophy of language.

The classical view of figurative meaning was challenged by the Romantics.


Against the view of figures as mere ornaments, they claimed that tropes have no
literal paraphrases and that language is figurative through and through. The romantic
rejection of the literal-figurative distinction has had more influence on literary studies
and continental philosophy than on analytic philosophy. However, recent work in
cognitive psychology and pragmatics (e.g. Lakoff 1987; Gibbs 1994; Glucksberg
2001) also challenges the classical view in a variety of ways, some of which should
have philosophical relevance.

Grice’s account of tropes is closer to the classical than the Romantic approach.
Suppose that the speaker of (12) or (13) manifestly could not have intended to commit
herself to the truth of the propositions literally expressed: it is common knowledge
that she knows that John is not a computer, or that she thinks it is bad weather:

12. John is a computer

13. It’s lovely weather.

She is therefore overtly violating Grice’s first maxim of Quality (‘Do not say what
you believe to be false’). According to Grice, such overt violation or FLOUTING of a
maxim indicates a speaker's intention: the speaker intends the hearer to retrieve an
implicature which brings the full interpretation of the utterance (i.e. what is said plus
what is implicated) as close as possible to satisfying the Cooperative Principle and
maxims. In the case of tropes, the required implicature is related to what is said in one
of several possible ways, each characteristic of a different trope. With metaphor, the
implicature is a simile based on what is said; with irony, it is the opposite of what is
said; with hyperbole, it is a weaker proposition, and with understatement, a stronger
one.16[16] Thus, Grice might analyse (12) as implicating (14) below, and (13) as
implicating (15):

14. John processes information like a computer.

15. The weather is bad.

As in the classical rhetorical approach, literal meanings are primary, and figurative
meanings are associated with literal meanings in simple and systematic ways. What
Grice adds is the idea that figurative meanings are derived in the pragmatic process of
utterance comprehension and that this derivation is triggered by the fact the literal
interpretation is an overt departure from conversational maxims.

However, there is a problem with explaining the interpretation of tropes in terms


of standard Gricean implicatures. In general, the recovery of an implicature is meant
to restore the assumption that the maxims have been observed, or that their violation
was justified in the circumstances (as when a speaker is justified by her ignorance in
providing less information than required)(Grice 1989: 370). In the case of tropes, the
first maxim of Quality seems to be irretrievably violated, and the implicature provides
no circumstantial justification whatsoever: what justification could there be for
implicitly conveying something true by saying something blatantly false, when one
could have spoken truthfully in the first place? In fact, there is some textual evidence
to suggest that Grice had in mind a slightly different treatment, on which the speaker
in metaphor or irony does not actually say, but merely “makes as if to say” what the

16[16] Here we will consider metaphor and related phenomena. For analyses of irony
and understatement, see Sperber & Wilson (1981, 1986: Chapter 4.7, 4.9, 1990;
1998b); Wilson & Sperber (1992).
sentence she utters literally means (Grice 1967/89: 34). But in that case, since nothing
is genuinely said, the first Quality maxim is not violated at all, and an account in
terms of overt violation does not go through.

A Gricean way to go (although Grice himself did not take this route) would be to
argue that what is violated is not the first maxim of Quality but the first maxim of
Quantity (‘Make your contribution as informative as is required’), since if nothing is
said, no information is provided. The implicature could then be seen as part of an
overall interpretation that satisfies this maxim. However, this creates a further
problem, since the resulting interpretations of figurative utterances would irretrievably
violate the Manner maxims. In classical rhetoric, where a metaphor such as (12) or an
irony such as (13) is merely an indirect and decorative way of communicating the
propositions in (14) or (15), this ornamental value might help to explain the use of
tropes (in so far as classical rhetoricians were interested in explanation at all). Quite
sensibly, Grice does not appeal to ornamental value. His supermaxim of Manner is
not ‘Be fancy’ but ‘Be perspicuous.’ However, he does assume, in accordance with
classical rhetoric, that figurative meanings, like literal meanings, are fully
propositional, and paraphrasable in literal terms. Which raises the following question:
isn't a direct and literal expression of what you mean always more perspicuous (and in
particular less obscure and less ambiguous, cf. the first and second Manner maxims)
than an indirect figurative expression?

There are deeper problems with any attempt (either classical or Gricean) to treat
language use as governed by a norm of literalness, and figurative utterances as overt
departures from the norm. Apart from creative literary metaphors and aggressive
forms of irony, which are indeed meant to be noticed, ordinary language use is full of
tropes that are understood without attracting any more attention than strictly literal
utterances. This familiar observation has now been experimentally confirmed:
reaction-time studies show that most metaphors take no longer to understand than
their literal counterparts (Gibbs 1994; Glucksberg 2001; see also Noveck et al. 2001).
This does not square with the view that the hearer of a metaphor first considers its
literal interpretation, then rejects it as blatantly false or incongruous, and then
constructs a figurative interpretation.
Moreover, while there is room for argument about which metaphors are noticed
as such and which are not, ordinary discourse is full of utterances which would violate
the first maxim of Quality if literally understood, but are not perceived as violations
by ordinary language users. We are thinking here of approximations and loose uses of
language such as those in (16)-(19) (discussed in greater detail in Wilson & Sperber
2002):

16. The lecture starts at five o’clock.

17. Holland is flat.

18. Sue: I must run to the bank before it closes.

19. Jane: I have a terrible cold. I need a Kleenex.

If the italicised expressions in (16)–(19) are literally understood, these utterances are
not strictly true: lectures rarely start at exactly the appointed time, Holland is not a
plane surface, Sue must hurry to the bank but not necessarily run there, and other
brands of disposable tissue would do just as well for Jane. Despite the fact that hearers
do not normally perceive them as literally false, such loose uses of language are not
misleading. This raises a serious issue for any philosophy of language based on a
maxim or convention of truthfulness. In some cases, it could be argued that the words
are in fact ambiguous, with a strict sense and a more general sense, both known to
competent language users. For instance, the word ‘Kleenex’, originally a brand name,
may also have come to mean, more generally, a disposable tissue. However, such
ambiguities ultimately derive from repeated instances in which the original brand
name is loosely used. If ‘Kleenex’ now has TISSUE as one of its lexical senses, it is
because the word was often loosely used to convey this broader meaning before it
became lexicalised.

Approximations such as (16) and (17) are generally treated in philosophy of


language under the heading of VAGUENESS. Vagueness can itself be analysed in
semantic or pragmatic terms. There are certainly words with vague linguistic senses –
‘old’ or ‘ovoid’, for instance – and vagueness is therefore at least partly a semantic
phenomenon. With other expressions, such as ‘five o’clock,’ ‘hexagonal’ or ‘flat,’ it
seems more appropriate to assign a precise semantics and propose a pragmatic
explanation of why they are frequently understood as approximations. David Lewis
argues that in such cases, ‘the standards of precision in force are different from one
conversation to another, and may change in the course of a single conversation.
Austin's “France is hexagonal” is a good example of a sentence that is true enough for
many contexts but not true enough for many others’ (1979: 245).

Both standard semantic and pragmatic treatments of vagueness presuppose that


there is a continuum or a fine-grained series of cases between narrower and broader
interpretations. This may indeed be true of semantically vague terms such as ‘old’ or
‘ovoid,’ and of terms such as ‘flat,’ ‘hexagonal,’ or ‘five o’clock,’ which are often
understood as approximations (Gross 2001). However, with ‘run’ in (18) and
‘Kleenex’ in (19), no such continuum exists. There is a sharp discontinuity, for
instance, between running (where both feet leave the ground at each step) and walking
(where there is always at least one foot on the ground). Typically (though not
necessarily), running is faster than walking, so that ‘run’ may be loosely used, as in
(18), to indicate the activity of going on foot (whether walking or running) at a speed
more typical of running. But walking at different speeds is not equivalent to running
relative to different standards of precision. ‘Run,’ ‘Kleenex’ and many other words
have sharp conceptual boundaries, frequent loose interpretations, and no ordered
series of successively broader extensions which might be picked out by raising or
lowering some standard of precision. Such cases of loose use seem to call for a special
kind of pragmatic treatment, since they are non-literal, but neither the Gricean account
of figurative interpretation nor the standard pragmatic treatment of vagueness applies
to them.

Do we need four different kinds of analysis for literal, vague, loose, and figurative
meanings? Relevance theory is unique in proposing a unified account of all these
cases. From the general claim that an utterance is a piece of evidence about the
speaker’s meaning, it follows, at the lexical level, that the function of words in an
utterance is not to encode but merely to indicate the concepts that are constituents of
the speaker’s meaning. We are not denying that words do encode concepts (or at least
semantic features), and that they are (at least partly) decoded during the
comprehension process; however, we are claiming that the output of decoding is
merely a point of departure for identifying the concepts intended by the speaker. The
presence in an utterance of an expression with a given sense licenses a variety of
(typically non-demonstrative) inferences. Some of these inferences contribute to
satisfying the hearer’s expectations of relevance, and are therefore drawn. Others
don’t, and aren’t. In the process, there is a mutual adjustment between explicatures
and implicatures. The decoded content helps to identify the inferences that make the
utterance relevant as expected, and is readjusted so as to warrant just those inferences
that contribute to the relevance of the utterance as a whole. In particular, the
constituent concepts of the explicature are constructed ad hoc, starting from the
linguistically encoded concepts, but quite often departing from them so as to optimise
the relevance of the overall interpretation (Carston 1997, 2002: chapter 5; Sperber &
Wilson 1998a; Wilson & Sperber 2002; Wilson 2003).

Suppose, for instance, you have a lecture one afternoon, but don’t know exactly
when it is due to start. You are told, ‘The lecture starts at five o’clock.’ From this
utterance, and in particular from the phrase ‘at five o’clock’, together with contextual
premises, you can draw a number of inferences that make the utterance relevant to
you: that you will not be free to do other things between five and seven o’clock, that
you should leave the library no later than 4.45, that it will be too late to go shopping
after the lecture, and so on. None of these inferences depends on ‘five o’ clock’ being
strictly understood. There are inferences that depend on a strict interpretation (for
instance, that the lecture will have begun by 5.01), but they don’t contribute to the
relevance of the utterance, and you don’t draw them. According to the relevance-
theoretic approach, you then take the speaker to be committed to the truth of a
proposition that warrants just the implications you did derive, a proposition which
might be paraphrased, say, as ‘The lecture starts between five o’clock and ten past,’
but which you, the hearer, would have no need to try and formulate exactly in your
mind. Note that if the speaker had uttered the more accurate ‘between five o’clock
and ten past’ instead of the approximation ‘at five o’clock,’ the overall effort required
for comprehension would have been increased rather than reduced, since you would
have had to process a longer sentence and a more complex meaning without any
saving on the inferential level. Note, too, that we cannot explain how this
approximation is understood by assuming that the standard of precision in force
allows for, say, a variation of ten minutes around the stated time. If the lecture might
start ten minutes earlier than five o’clock, then the inferences worth drawing would
not be the same.

This process of ad hoc concept construction via mutual adjustment of explicatures


and implicatures is quite general. It works in the same way with metaphors. Consider
the metaphor ‘John is a computer’ in two different exchanges:

20a. Peter: Is John a good accountant?

20b. Mary: John is a computer.

21a. Peter: How good a friend is John?

21b. Mary: John is a computer.

In each case, the encoded sense of ‘computer’ draws the hearer’s attention to some
features of computers that they may share with some human beings. Like the best
accountants, computers can process large amounts of numerical information and
never make mistakes, and so on. Unlike good friends, computers lack emotions, and
so on. In each case, Peter builds an ad hoc concept indicated, though not encoded, by
the word ‘computer’, such that John’s falling under this concept has implications that
answer the question in (20a) or (21a). Note that Mary need not have in mind the
precise implications that Peter will derive, as long as her utterance encourages him to
derive the kind of implications that answer his question along the intended lines. So
the Romantics were right to argue that the figurative meaning of a live metaphor
cannot be properly paraphrased. However, this is not because the meaning is some
non-truth-conditional set of associations or ‘connotations’. It is because it consists of
an ad hoc concept that is characterised by its inferential role and not by a definition,
and moreover this inferential role, to a much greater extent than in the case of mere
approximations, is left to the hearer to elaborate. Metaphorical communication is
relatively weak communication.
In the case of approximations or metaphors, concept construction results in a
broadening of the encoded concept; in other cases, as in (5a) (‘I’ll bring a bottle’) and
(6b) above, it results in a narrowing. Recall that in (6), Lisa has dropped by her
neighbours, the Joneses, who have just sat down to supper:

6a. Alan Jones: Do you want to join us for supper?

6b. Lisa: No, thanks. I've eaten.

As noted above, in order to produce a relevant interpretation of Lisa’s answer ‘I’ve


eaten’, some enrichment of the encoded sentence meaning must take place. In
particular, the time span indicated by the perfect ‘have eaten’ must be narrowed down
to the evening of utterance, and ‘eaten’ must be understood as conveying the ad hoc
concept EAT SUPPER. If Lisa has eaten supper on the previous day, or eaten an olive
that evening, she would literally have eaten, but not in a relevant sense. In still other
cases, the result of the same process of meaning construction is that the concept
indicated by use of the word ‘eaten’ as a constituent of the intended meaning is the
very one it encodes. If Lisa is supposed to follow a religious fast and says ‘I’ve eaten’,
then the concept EAT that is part of her meaning is just the linguistically-encoded
one: a single olive is enough to break a fast.

The comprehension process itself does not involve classifying interpretations as


literal, approximate, loose, metaphorical, and so on. These classifications belong to
linguistic theories, including folk and philosophical theories, and play a role in
metalinguistic arguments. However, a pragmatic approach suggests that these notions
may denote regions on a continuum rather than sharply distinct categories, and may
play no role in a proper theory of language use.

6. Procedural meaning: speech acts, presuppositions and indexicals


We have tried to show that a contextualist approach to semantics combined with a
relevance-oriented approach to pragmatics can yield appropriate accounts of speaker’s
meaning. Starting with the strongest candidates for literalist treatment – constructions
which are plausibly analysed as encoding concepts that contribute to explicit truth-
conditional content – we have argued that even with these strongest candidates the
case for literalism does not go through. Many aspects of explicit truth-conditional
content are not encoded at all, and utterances do not always communicate the
concepts they encode. Moreover, a wide range of linguistic constructions contribute to
other aspects of speaker’s meaning than explicit truth-conditional content, or encode
aspects of meaning that are not plausibly analysed in conceptual terms. Examples
include illocutionary force indicators, presupposition triggers, indexicals and
demonstratives, focusing devices, parentheticals, discourse connectives,
argumentative operators, prosody, interjections, and so on. Because these
constructions fall outside the scope of standard literalist approaches, their linguistic
meaning is sometimes characterised as ‘pragmatic’ rather than semantic (although the
proposed analyses have rarely shown much concern for how they might contribute to
a properly inferential pragmatics). We see these items as providing strong evidence
for a contextualist approach to semantics combined with a relevance-oriented
pragmatics, and will end by briefly considering how they might be approached within
the framework we have outlined.

Speech-act theorists such as Austin, Searle, Katz and Bach & Harnish underlined
the fact that a speaker’s meaning should be seen not merely as a set of (asserted)
propositions, but as a set of propositions each with a recommended propositional
attitude or illocutionary force. The treatment of illocutionary and attitudinal meaning
has developed in parallel to the treatment of explicit truth-conditional content, with
early literalist accounts replaced by more contextualist accounts in which the role of
speakers’ intentions and pragmatic inference is increasingly recognised.17[17] In
relevance theory, these non-truth-conditional aspects of speaker’s meaning are
analysed as HIGHER-LEVEL explicatures constructed (like the basic explicatures
considered in section 4) by development of encoded schematic sentence meanings. In
uttering (22), for example, Mary might convey not only the basic explicature in (23a),

17[17] See e.g. Strawson (1964); Searle (1969, 1975); Katz (1977); Recanati (1987);
Tsohatzidis (1994); Sadock (2004).
which constitutes the explicit truth-conditional content of her utterance, but a range of
higher-level explicatures such as (23b-d) (any of which might contribute to overall
relevance):

22. Confidentially, I didn’t enjoy the meal.

23a. Mary didn’t enjoy the meal.

23b. Mary is telling Peter confidentially that she didn’t enjoy the meal.

23c. Mary is admitting confidentially to Peter that she didn’t enjoy the meal.

23d. Mary believes she didn’t enjoy the meal.

As this example shows, higher-level explicatures, like basic explicatures, are


recovered through a combination of decoding and inference, and may be more or less
explicit. Thus, Mary could have made her meaning more explicit by uttering (24), and
left it less explicit by merely indicating through her behaviour or tone of voice that
she was speaking to Peter in confidence:

24. I tell you confidentially, I didn’t enjoy the meal.

Speech-act theorists distinguish DESCRIBING from INDICATING. Descriptive


expressions may be seen as encoding concepts in the regular way (although we have
argued that the encoded concept gives no more than a schematic indication of the
speaker’s meaning). Indicators are seen as carrying other types of information, which
contribute to speaker’s meaning in other ways than by encoding regular concepts. As
illustrated by (22)-(24)(‘Confidentially, I didn’t enjoy the meal’, ‘I tell you
confidentially, I didn’t enjoy the meal’), higher-level explicatures may be conveyed
by a mixture of describing and indicating. While illocutionary adverbials and
parentheticals such as ‘confidentially’, ‘I tell you confidentially’, ‘I tell you in total
and utter confidence’ clearly have descriptive content, mood indicators such as
declarative or interrogative word order, imperative, indicative or subjunctive verb
morphology and exclamatory or interrogative intonation fall on the indicating side.
How is their encoded meaning to be analysed, if not in conceptual terms? We would
like to suggest that their semantic function is to guide the hearer in the inferential
construction of higher-level explicatures by narrowing the search space, increasing
the salience of certain candidates, and diminishing the salience of others. In some
cases, the search space may be reduced to a single plausible candidate, while in
others, there may be several, so that the resulting implicatures may be stronger or
weaker. As expected, conceptual encoding leads to stronger communication than
linguistic indication (Wilson & Sperber 1988, 1993; Sperber & Wilson 1986/95:
chapter 4.10; Ifantidou 2001).

As noted at the beginning of this section, languages have a rich variety of


indicators, which contribute to other aspects of speaker’s meaning than illocutionary
force; in the framework we have outlined, these would be analysed on similar lines to
mood indicators, as contributing to relevance by guiding the hearer towards the
intended explicit content, context or conclusions. Consider, for instance, the
contribution of the indexical or demonstrative ‘here’ to the explicit truth-conditional
content of (25):

25. I have been here for two hours.

The semantic function of ‘here’ is simultaneously to indicate that a referent is


required and to restrict the search space to a certain class of candidates, some of
which may be made more salient by gesture, direction of gaze or discourse context
(and will therefore be more accessible to the relevance-theoretic comprehension
heuristic). Even when all these clues are taken into account, they may not determine a
unique interpretation. For example, (25) may be true (and relevant) if ‘here’ is
understood to mean ‘in this library’, but false if understood to mean ‘in this room’ or
‘on this spot’. The encoded meaning of ‘here’ is only a clue to the speaker’s meaning,
which is recovered, as always, by mutual adjustment of explicatures and implicatures
in the search for optimal relevance.

Finally, a range of items such as ‘even’, ‘still’, ‘but’, ‘indeed’, ‘also’ and ‘after
all’, which have been seen as encoding information about ‘presuppositions’,
conventional implicatures or argumentative orientation instead of (or as well as)
descriptive information,18[18] may be analysed as restricting the search space for
implicated premises and conclusions, or as indicating what type of inferential process
the hearer is intended to go through in establishing relevance. To give just one
illustration, compare (26a) and (26b):

26a. John is a philosopher and he enjoys detective stories.

26b. John is a philosopher but he enjoys detective stories.

As these examples show, although ‘and’ and ‘but’ are descriptively equivalent, they
orient the hearer towards different types of interpretation (Ducrot 1984; Blakemore
1987, 2002; Hall 2004). The use of ‘and’ in (26a), for example, is compatible with an
interpretation in which the fact that John enjoys detective stories is unsurprising given
that he is a philosopher, while the use of ‘but’ in (26b) suggests an interpretation in
which the fact that John is a philosopher makes it surprising that he enjoys detective
stories. The effect of ‘but’ is to narrow the search space for inferential comprehension
by facilitating access to certain types of context or conclusion: it may therefore be
seen, like mood indicators and indexicals, as indicating a rather abstract property of
the speaker’s meaning: the direction in which relevance is to be sought.19[19]

The few attempts that have been made to provide a unified account of indicators
have been based on the speech act distinction between conditions on USE and
18[18] See for example Stalnaker (1974); Wilson (1975); Gazdar (1979); Karttunen &
Peters (1979); Grice (1981); Anscombre & Ducrot (1983), Sperber & Wilson
(1986/95: chapter 4.5); Blakemore (1987, 2002); Wilson & Sperber (1993); Bruxelles,
Ducrot & Raccah (1995); Horn (1996); Kadmon (2001); Atlas (2004); Hall (2004);
Iten (forthcoming).

19[19] For an account of interjections within this framework, see Wharton 2003.
conditions on TRUTH (Recanati 2004b). However, as noted above, not all indicators are
analysable in speech-act terms, and the distinction between conditions on truth and
conditions on use runs the risk of becoming trivial or non-explanatory when removed
from the speech-act framework. While it is clear why certain acts have felicity
conditions (e.g. only someone with the appropriate authority can give an order,
perform a baptism, and so on), it is not clear why linguistic expressions such as ‘it’
and ‘that’, or ‘even’ and ‘also’, which have no obvious analysis in speech-act terms,
should have conditions on their appropriate use. By contrast, if the function of
indicators is to contribute to inferential comprehension by guiding the hearer towards
the speaker’s meaning, the conditions on their use fall out as a natural consequence.
More generally, from a radical literalist perspective, it is surprising to find any items
at all that contribute to meaning without encoding concepts. From the perspective
outlined in this chapter, there is no presumption that all linguistic meaning should be
either conceptual or truth-conditional: the only requirement on linguistic meaning is
that it guide the hearer towards the speaker’s meaning by indicating the direction in
which relevance is to be sought.

7. Conclusion

When pragmatics emerged as a distinct discipline at the end of the 1960s, analytic
philosophy was dominated by philosophy of language, and the cognitive sciences
were still in their infancy. Since then, as the cognitive sciences have matured and
expanded, priority in philosophy has shifted from philosophy of language to
philosophy of mind. The development of pragmatics reflects this shift. Part of Grice’s
originality was to approach meaning as a primarily psychological phenomenon and
only derivatively a linguistic one. By underlining the gap between sentence meaning
and speaker’s meaning, he made it possible, of course, for ideal language
philosophers to ignore many context-dependent features of speaker's meaning that
ordinary language philosophers had used as evidence against formal approaches.
However, far from claiming that linguistic meaning was the only type of meaning
amenable to scientific treatment and worthy of philosophical attention, he suggested
that speaker's meaning was relevant to philosophy and could be properly studied in its
own right. As pragmatics has developed, it has become increasingly clear that the gap
between sentence meaning and speaker's meaning is wider than Grice himself
thought, and that pragmatic inference contributes not only to implicit content but also
to truth-conditional aspects of explicit content. While the effect may be to remove
from linguistic semantics more phenomena than some semanticists might be willing
to relinquish, it does not make the field any less challenging: in fact, the semantics-
pragmatics interface becomes an interesting interdisciplinary area of research in its
own right. However, as the gap between sentence meaning and speaker's meaning
widens, it increasingly brings into question a basic assumption of much philosophy of
language, that the semantics of sentences provides straightforward, direct access to
the structure of human thoughts. We have argued that linguistic meanings are mental
representations that play a role at an intermediate stage in the comprehension process.
Unlike speaker's meanings (which they resemble in the way a skeleton resembles a
body), linguistic meanings are not consciously entertained. In other words, whereas
speakers’ meanings are salient objects in personal psychology, linguistic meanings
only play a role in sub-personal cognition.

Within pragmatics itself, there is a tension between more linguistically-oriented


and more cognitively-oriented approaches. By idealising away from properties of the
context that are hard to formalise, and focusing on aspects of interpretation (e.g.
‘presuppositions’ or 'generalised implicatures') which exhibit a kind of code-like
regularity, it is possible to extend the methods of formal semantics to a sub-part of the
pragmatic domain (assuming that these phenomena are genuinely pragmatic, which is
in some cases contentious) (Kadmon 2001; Blutner & Zeevat 2003). Good or bad, the
resulting analyses are unlikely to generalise to the whole domain of pragmatics. The
cognitive approach, and in particular relevance theory (on which we have focused
here), approaches verbal comprehension as a psychological process. The challenge is
precisely to explain how the closed formal system of language provides effective
pieces of evidence which, combined with further evidence from an open and dynamic
context, enable hearers to infer speakers' meanings. The methods to be used are those
of cognitive psychology, including modelling of cognitive processes, experimental
tests, studies of communication pathologies (e.g. autism), and evolutionary insights.
Pragmatics so conceived is relevant to linguistics because of the light it throws on the
semantics-pragmatics interface. Its main relevance is to cognitive psychology, and in
particular to the study of mind-reading and inference mechanisms. Its implications for
the philosophy of language are largely cautionary and deflationary, amounting mainly
to downplaying the philosophical significance of linguistic meanings. Its main
philosophical relevance is to philosophy of mind. In particular, by describing
comprehension, a very common, easy, everyday process, as a form of richly context-
dependent inference, pragmatics provides an illustration of how to approach central
cognitive processes, which, precisely because of their context-dependence, have been
treated by Fodor as a major mystery for cognitive psychology and philosophy of
mind.

References

Anscombre, Jean-Claude & Ducrot, Oswald. 1983. L’argumentation dans la langue.


Mardaga:,Brussels.

Asher, Nicholas & Lascarides, Alex. 1995. Lexical disambiguation in a discourse


context. Journal of Semantics 12: 69-108.

Asher, Nicholas & Lascarides, Alex. 1998. The semantics and pragmatics of
presupposition. Journal of Semantics 15 : 239-300.

Asher, Nicholas & Lascarides, Alex. 2003. Logics of Conversation. Cambridge


University Press, Cambridge.

Atlas, Jay. 2004. Presupposition. In Horn & Ward 2004: 29-52.

Atlas, Jay. 2005. Logic, Meaning, and Conversation: Semantical Underdeterminacy,


Implicature, And Their Interface. Oxford University Press, Oxford.

Bach, Kent. 1987. On communicative intentions: A reply to Recanati. Mind &


Language 2: 141-54.

Bach, Kent. 1994. Conversational impliciture. Mind and Language 9: 124-62.

Bach, Kent. 1999. The myth of conventional implicature. Linguistics & Philosophy
22: 327-66.
Bach, Kent. 2001. You don’t say? Synthese 127: 11-31.

Bach, Kent. 2004. Pragmatics and the philosophy of language. In Horn & Ward 2004:
461-87.

Bach, Kent & Harnish, Robert Michael. 1979. Linguistic Communication and Speech
Acts. MIT Press, Cambridge MA.

Bezuidenhout, Anne & Morris, Robin. 2004. Implicature, relevance and default
inferences. In Dan Sperber & Ira Noveck (eds.) Experimental Pragmatics.
Palgrave Press, London.

Blakemore, Diane. 1987. Semantic Constraints on Relevance. Blackwell, Oxford.

Blakemore, Diane. 2002. Linguistic Meaning and Relevance: The Semantics and
Pragmatics of Discourse Markers. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

Blutner, Reinhard & Zeevat, Henk. 2003. Optimality Theory and Pragmatics.
Palgrave, London

Breheny, Richard, Katsos, Napoleon & Williams, John. 2004.. An online


investigation into definiteness in implicature generations. RCEAL, Cambridge.

Bruxelles, Sylvie, Ducrot, Oswald & Raccah, Pierre-Yves. 1995. Argumentation and
the lexical topical fields. Journal of Pragmatics 24: 99-114.

Carston, Robyn. 1988. Implicature, explicature and truth-theoretic semantics. In Ruth


Kempson (ed.) Mental Representation: The Interface between Language and
Reality. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge: 155-81. Reprinted in Davis
1991: 33-51; Kasher (ed.) 1998, vol. IV: 464-479.

Carston. Robyn. 1995. Quantity maxims and generalised implicature. Lingua 96: 213-
44.

Carston, Robyn. 1997. Enrichment and loosening: complementary processes in


deriving the proposition expressed? Linguistische Berichte 8: 103-127.
Carston, Robyn. 1998. Informativeness, relevance and scalar implicature. In Robyn
Carston & Seiji Uchida (eds) Relevance Theory: Applications and Implications.
John Benjamins, Amsterdam: 179-236.

Carston, Robyn. 2000. Explicature and semantics. UCL Working Papers in


Linguistics 12: 1-44. Reprinted in Stephen Davis & Brad Gillon (eds.) 2004.
Semantics: A Reader. Oxford University Press, Oxford.

Carston, Robyn. 2002. Thoughts and Utterances: The Pragmatics of Explicit


Communication. Blackwell, Oxford.

Chierchia, Gennaro, Crain, Stephen, Guasti, Maria Teresa, Gualmini, Andrea &
Meroni, Luisa. 2001. The acquisition of disjunction: Evidence for a grammatical
view of scalar implicatures. BUCLD 25 Proceedings: 157-68. Cascadilla Press,
Somerville, MA.

Clark, Herbert H. 1977. Bridging. In Philip Johnson-Laird & Peter Wason (eds.)
Thinking: Readings in Cognitive Science. Cambridge University Press,
Cambridge: 411-20.

Clark, Herbert H. 1993. Arenas of Language Use. CSLI, Stanford, CA.

Clark, Herbert H. 1996. Using Language. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

Dascal, Marcelo. 1981. Contextualism. In Herman Parret, Marina Sbisà & Jef
Verschueren (eds.) Possibilities and Limitations of Pragmatics. John Benjamins,
Amsterdam.

Davis, Steven (ed.). 1991. Pragmatics: A Reader. Oxford University Press, Oxford.

Ducrot, Oswald. 1984. Le Dire et le Dit. Minuit, Paris.

Fauconnier, Gilles. 1975. Pragmatic scales and logical structure. Linguistic Inquiry 6:
353-75.

Fauconnier, Gilles. 1985. Mental Spaces: Aspects of Meaning Construction in


Natural Language. MIT Press/Bradford Books, Cambridge, MA.
Fauconnier, Gilles. 1997. Mappings in Thought and Language. Cambridge University
Press, Cambridge.

Gazdar, Gerald. 1979. Pragmatics: Implicature, Presupposition and Logical Form.


Academic Press, London.

Gibbs, Ray. 1994. The Poetics of Mind: Figurative Thought, Language and
Understanding. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

Glucksberg, Sam. 2001. Understanding Figurative Language. Oxford University


Press, Oxford.

Green, Mitchell. 1995. Quantity, volubility, and some varieties of discourse.


Linguistics and Philosophy 19: 83-112.

Grice, H. Paul. 1957. Meaning. Philosophical Review 66: 377-388. Reprinted in H. P.


Grice 1989: 213-223.

Grice, H. Paul. 1967. Logic and Conversation. William James Lectures. Published in
H. P. Grice 1989: 3-143.

Grice, H. Paul. 1981. Presupposition and conversational implicature. In Peter Cole


(ed.) Radical Pragmatics. Academic Press, New York: 183-198. Reprinted in
Grice 1989: 269-82.

Grice, H. Paul. 1982. Meaning revisited. In Neil Smith (ed.) Mutual Knowledge.
Academic Press, London: 223-43. Reprinted in Grice 1989: 283-303.

Grice, H. Paul. 1989. Studies in the Way of Words. Harvard University Press,
Cambridge MA.

Gross, Steven. 2001. Essays on Linguistic Context-Sensitivity and its Philosophical


Significance. Routledge, London.

Hall, Alison. 2004. The meaning of ‘but’: A procedural reanalysis. To appear in UCL
Working Papers in Linguistics 16: 199-236.
Harnish, Robert Michael. 1976. Logical form and implicature. In T. Bever, J. Katz, &
D.T. Langendoen (eds) An Integrated Theory of Linguistic Ability: 313-91.
Crowell, New York. Reprinted in Davis 1991: 316-64.

Harnish, Robert Michael. 1994. Mood, meaning and speech acts. In Savas Tsohatzidis
(ed.) Foundations of Speech-Act Theory: Philosophical and Linguistic
Perspectives: 407-459. Routledge, London.

Hirschberg, Julia. 1991. A Theory of Scalar Implicature. Garland, New York.

Hobbs, Jerry. 1979. Coherence and coreference. Cognitive Science: 27-90.

Hobbs, Jerry. 1985. On the coherence and structure of discourse. CSLI Report 85-37.
Menlo Park, California.

Hobbs, Jerry. 2004. Abduction in natural language understanding. In Horn & Ward:
724-741.

Hobbs, Jerry, Stickel, Mark, Appelt, Douglas & Martin, Paul 1993. Interpretation as
abduction. Artificial Intelligence 63: 69-142.

Horn, Laurence. 1984. Towards a new taxonomy for pragmatic inference: Q- and R-
based implicature. In D. Schiffrin (ed.) Meaning, Form, and Use in Context: 11-
42. Georgetown University Press, Washington DC.

Horn, Laurence. 1989. A Natural History of Negation. University of Chicago Press,


Chicago IL.

Horn, Laurence. 1992. The said and the unsaid. SALT II: Proceedings of the Second
Conference on Semantics and Linguistic Theory: 163-202. Ohio State University
Linguistics Department, Columbus OH.

Horn, Laurence. 1996. Presupposition and implicature. In Shalom Lappin (ed.) The
Handbook of Contemporary Semantic Theory. Blackwell, Oxford: 299-320.

Horn, Laurence. 2000. From IF to IFF: Conditional perfection as pragmatic


strengthening. Journal of Pragmatics 32: 289-326.
Horn, Laurence. 2004. Implicature. In Horn & Ward: 3-28.

Horn, Laurence. 2005. The Border wars: A neo-Gricean perspective. In Ken Turner &
Klaus von Heusinger (eds.), Where Semantics Meets Pragmatics. Elsevier,
Amsterdam.

Horn, Laurence & Ward, Gregory. 2004. The Handbook of Pragmatics. Blackwell,
Oxford.

Ifantidou, Elly. 2001. Evidentials and Relevance. John Benjamins, Amsterdam.

Iten, Corinne. forthcoming. Linguistic Meaning, Truth Conditions and Relevance.


Palgrave Press, London.

Jackson, Frank (ed.) 1991. Conditionals. Oxford University Press, Oxford.

Kadmon, Nirit. 2001. Formal Pragmatics: Semantics, Pragmatics, Presupposition


and Focus. Blackwell, Oxford.

Karttunen, Lauri & Peters, Stanley. 1979. Conventional implicature. In Oh, Choon-
Yu, & Dineen, David (eds.) Syntax & Semantics 11: Presupposition: 1-56.
Academic Press, New York.

Kasher, Asa. 1976. Conversational maxims and rationality. In Asa Kasher (ed.)
Language in Focus: Foundations, Methods and Systems. Reidel, Dordrecht: 197-
211. Reprinted in Kasher 1998, vol. IV: 181-214.

Kasher, Asa. 1982. Gricean inference revisited. Philosophica 29: 25-44.

Kasher, Asa. 1984. Pragmatics and the modularity of mind. Journal of Pragmatics 8:
539-557. Revised version reprinted in: Davis 1991: 567-582.

Kasher, Asa (ed.). 1998. Pragmatics: Critical Concepts, vols I-V. Routledge, London.

Katz, Jerrold. 1977. Propositional Structure and Illocutionary force, New York:
Crowell.
Lakoff, George. 1987. Women, Fire and Dangerous Things, University of Chicago
Press, Chicago, IL.

Levinson, Stephen. 1983. Pragmatics. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

Levinson, Stephen. 1987. Minimization and conversational inference. In Jef


Verschueren & Marcella Bertuccelli-Papi (eds) The Pragmatic Perspective. John
Benjamins, Amsterdam: 61-129.

Levinson, Stephen. 2000. Presumptive Meanings: The Theory of Generalized


Conversational Implicature. MIT Press, Cambridge MA.

Lewis, David. 1979. Scorekeeping in a language game. Reprinted in David Lewis


1983. Philosophical Papers, vol. 1: 233-249. Oxford University Press, New
York.

Lewis, David. 1983. Philosophical Papers, vol 1. Oxford University Press, New
York.

Matsui, Tomoko. 2000. Bridging and Relevance. John Benjamins, Amsterdam.

Matsumoto, Yo. 1995. The conversational condition on Horn scales. Linguistics and
Philosophy 18: 21-60.

Morris, Charles. 1938. Foundations of the Theory of Signs. University of Chicago


Press, Chicago, IL.

Neale, Stephen.1990. Descriptions. MIT Press, Cambridge MA.

Neale, Stephen. 1992. Paul Grice and the philosophy of language. Linguistics and
Philosophy 15: 509-59.

Neale, Stephen. 2004. This, that and the other. In Anne Bezuidenhout & Marga
Reimer (eds). Descriptions and Beyond: An Interdisciplinary Collection of
Essays on Definite and Indefinite Descriptions and Other Related Phenomena.
Oxford University Press, Oxford.
Neale, Stephen. forthcoming. Linguistic Pragmatism. Oxford University Press,
Oxford.

Noveck, Ira. 2001. When children are more logical than adults: Investigations of
scalar implicature. Cognition 78: 165-188.

Noveck, Ira, Bianco, Maryse & Castry, Alain. 2001. The costs and benefits of
metaphor. Metaphor and Symbol 16: 109-121.
Papafragou, Anna & Musolino, Julien. 2003. Scalar implicatures: Experiments at the
semantics-pragmatics interface. Cognition 86: 253-282.
Recanati, François. 1986. On defining communicative intentions. Mind & Language
1: 213-242.

Recanati, François. 1987. Meaning and Force. Cambridge University Press,


Cambridge.

Recanati, François. 1989. The pragmatics of what is said. Mind & Language 4: 295-
329. Reprinted in Davis 1991: 97-120.

Recanati, François. 1995. The alleged priority of literal interpretation. Cognitive


Science 19: 207-32.

Recanati, François. 1998. Pragmatics. In Edward Craig (ed.) Routledge


Encyclopaedia of Philosophy 7: 620-33.

Recanati, François. 2002. Unarticulated constituents. Linguistics and Philosophy 25:


299-345.

Recanati, François. 2004a. Literal Meaning. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

Recanati, François. 2004b. Semantics and pragmatics. In Horn & Ward 2004: 442-
462.

Sadock, Jerry. 2004. Speech acts. In Horn & Ward 2004: 53-73.

Salmon, Nathan. 1986. Frege’s Puzzle. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.


Schiffer, Stephen. 1972. Meaning. Clarendon Press, Oxford.

Searle, John. 1969. Speech Acts. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

Searle, John. 1975. Indirect Speech Acts. In Peter Cole & Jerry Morgan (eds) Syntax
and Semantics 3: Speech Acts: 59-82. Academic Press, New York.

Searle, John. 1979. Expression and Meaning. Cambridge University Press,


Cambridge.

Searle, John. 1983. Intentionality. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

Schiffer, Stephen. 1972. Meaning. Clarendon Press, Oxford.

Sperber, Dan & Noveck, Ira (eds). 2004. Experimental Pragmatics. Palgrave,
London.

Sperber, Dan & Wilson, Deirdre. 1981. Irony and the use–mention distinction. In
Peter Cole (ed.) Radical Pragmatics: 295-318. Academic Press, New York.
Reprinted in Davis 1991: 550-63.

Sperber, Dan & Wilson, Deirdre. 1986. Relevance: Communication and Cognition.
Blackwell, Oxford and Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA. (Second
edition 1995. Blackwell, Oxford.)

Sperber, Dan & Wilson, Deirdre. 1990. Rhetoric and relevance. In John Bender &
David Wellbery (eds) The Ends of Rhetoric: History, Theory, Practice: 140-56.
Stanford University Press, Stanford CA: 140-56.

Sperber Dan & Wilson, Deirdre. 1995. Postface to the second edition of Relevance:
Communication and Cognition. Blackwell, Oxford.

Sperber, Dan & Wilson, Deirdre. 1998a. The mapping between the mental and the
public lexicon. In Peter Carruthers & Jill Boucher (eds.) Language and Thought:
Interdisciplinary Themes. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge: 184-2000.
Sperber, Dan & Wilson, Deirdre. 1998b. Irony and relevance: A reply to Seto,
Hamamoto and Yamanashi. In Robyn Carston & Seiji Uchida (eds.) Relevance
Theory: Applications and Implications. John Benjamins, Amsterdam: 283-93.

Stalnaker, Robert. 1974. Pragmatic presuppositions. In Milton Munitz & Peter Unger
(eds) Semantics and Philosophy. New York University Press, New York.
Reprinted in Stalnaker 1999: 47-62.

Stalnaker, Robert. 1999. Context and Content: Essays on Intentionality in Speech and
Thought. Oxford University Press, Oxford.

Stanley, Jason. 2000. Context and logical form. Linguistics & Philosophy 23: 391-
434.

Stanley, Jason. 2002. Making it articulated. Mind & Language 17: 49-68.

Stanley, Jason & Szabó, Zoltan. 2000. On quantifier domain restriction. Mind &
Language 15: 219-61.

Strawson, Peter. 1964. Intention and convention in speech acts. Philosophical Review
73: 439-60. Reprinted in John Searle (ed.) 1971. The Philosophy of Language.
Oxford University Press, Oxford: 170-89.

Sweetser, Eve. 1990. From Etymology to Pragmatics: Metaphorical and Cultural


Aspects of Semantic Structure. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

Szabó, Zoltan (ed.) 2005. Semantics versus Pragmatics. Oxford University Press,
Oxford.

Travis, Charles. 1975. Saying and Understanding. Blackwell, Oxford.

Travis, Charles. 2001. Unshadowed Thought: Representation in Thought and


Language. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA.

Tsohatzidis, Savas (ed.) 1994. Foundations of Speech Act Theory: Philosophical and
Linguistic Perspectives. Routledge, London.
Turner, Kenneth (ed). 1999. The Semantics–Pragmatics Interface from Different
Points of View. Elsevier Science, Oxford.

van der Auwera, Johan. 1981. What do we Talk about When we Talk? Speculative
Grammar and the Semantics and Pragmatics of Focus. John Benjamins,
Amsterdam.

van der Auwera, Johan. 1985. Language and Logic. A Speculative and Condition-
Theoretic Study. John Benjamins, Amsterdam.

van der Auwera, Johan. 1997. Conditional perfection. In A. Athanasiadou, A. & R.


Dirven, R. (eds.) On Conditionals Again. John Benjamins, Amsterdam: 169-190.

Vanderveken, Daniel. 1990-91. Meaning and Speech Acts (2 vols). Cambridge


University Press, Cambridge.

van Rooy, Robert. 1999. Questioning to resolve decision problems. In P. Dekker (ed.)
Proceedings of the Twelfth Amsterdam Colloquium. Amsterdam: ILLC.

Wharton, Tim. 2003. Interjections, language and the ‘showing/saying’ continuum.


Pragmatics & Cognition 11: 39-91.

Wilson, Deirdre. 1975. Presuppositions and Non-Truth-Conditional Semantics.


London: Academic Press. Reprinted by Gregg Revivals, Aldershot, 1991.

Wilson, Deirdre. 2003. Relevance and lexical pragmatics. Italian Journal of


Linguistics/Rivista di Linguistica 15: 273-291.

Wilson, Deirdre & Matsui, Tomoko. 2000. Recent approaches to bridging: Truth,
coherence, relevance. In J de Bustos Tovar, P. Charaudeau, J. Alconchel, S.
Iglesias Recuero & C. Lopez Alonso (eds.) Lengua, Discurso, Texto, vol. 1: 103-
132. Visor Libros, Madrid.

Wilson, Deirdre & Sperber, Dan. 1981. On Grice’s theory of conversation. In P.


Werth (ed.) Conversation and Discourse. Croom Helm, London: 155-78.
Reprinted in Kasher 1998, vol. 1V: 347-68.
Wilson, Deirdre & Sperber, Dan. 1988. Mood and the analysis of non-declarative
sentences. In Jonathan Dancy, Julius Moravcsik & Christopher Taylor (eds)
Human Agency: Language, Duty and Value. Stanford University Press, Stanford,
CA: 77-101. Reprinted in Kasher 1998, vol. II: 262-89.

Wilson, Deirdre & Sperber, Dan. 1992. On verbal irony. Lingua 87: 53-76.

Wilson, Deirdre & Sperber, Dan. 1993. Linguistic form and relevance. Lingua 90: 1-
25.

Wilson, Deirdre & Sperber, Dan. 2002. Truthfulness and relevance. Mind 111: 583-
632.

Wilson, Deirdre & Sperber, Dan. 2004. Relevance theory. In Horn & Ward 2004:
607-632.

You might also like